I've Done Both Science and Arts —
The Skill That Matters Is in Neither.

The conversation

It started with a software subscription. We give the team proper tools — and someone on my team had the top-tier Claude seat, the expensive one, fully paid by the company. When I looked at the usage, most weeks she wasn't even hitting half of it. A capability handed over, switched on, and barely opened.

So I asked her about it. Not "why is the company paying for a seat you barely use" — that's only the symptom. I asked about her workflow: why keep explaining the same context, the same expectations, the same format to the AI over and over, every single time?

And my suggestion wasn't even "sit down and write yourself a standard." It was simpler: let Claude study her own work — the outcomes she already produces — and summarise them into a reusable work standard. The AI drafts it; she just refines it. After that, every task starts from that standard instead of a blank page — her workflow speeds up, and the seat she'd been given finally gets used to the full.

Her answer was honest, and it's the reason I'm writing this: "not everyone is from the science stream."

I sat with that. Because she's not unusual — she's the majority. Walk into almost any company in Malaysia and you'll hear the same sentence in different words: I'm not technical, I'm not an IT person, I'm from an arts background, this isn't for me. It has become the most socially acceptable way to opt out of anything with "AI" attached to it.

Summarising and structuring is not science

And I can say this from the inside: I've sat in both the science stream and the arts stream myself. The skill this is really about belongs to neither.

Think about what I actually asked her to do: let the tool learn from her own work, then read what it drafted and refine it — say clearly what "good" looks like, in her own words. The AI does the summarising; she just judges and shapes it. Where in that is the science?

Summarising, concluding, structuring a thought, saying clearly what you want — these are language skills. They're thinking skills. If anything, they sit closer to the arts than to engineering. The best prompt isn't code; it's a well-written brief. Anyone who can brief a junior staff member can brief an AI — it's the same muscle.

"I don't know" is fine. "I don't want to know" is the problem.

Let me be fair. Nobody is born knowing this. Not knowing how to use a tool is a completely reasonable starting point — it's where every one of us began, myself included.

"I don't know" is a starting line. "I don't want to know" is a full stop. Those are two different things wearing the same clothes. One is a person at the start of a learning curve. The other has decided the curve doesn't apply to them — and reached for "I'm not from the science stream" as the polite way to close the door.

The trouble is the market doesn't read your reasons. It doesn't check whether you studied science or art before deciding whether your skills are still worth paying for. It only notices whether you kept up. Choosing not to improve is a choice you're allowed to make — but then the market moving past you isn't unfair, and it isn't the market's fault. You can't decline to learn and also resent the consequence of declining.

Back to that half-used seat

This is why the underused subscription stuck with me. The tool wasn't the bottleneck. The capability was sitting right there — paid for by the company, switched on, waiting. What was missing wasn't science, or money, or access. It was the willingness to spend one afternoon learning to use it properly — to let it build the standard once instead of re-explaining forever.

That gap doesn't cost you a subscription fee. It compounds, quietly, into a gap between you and the people who did bother.

The line that actually matters

The divide forming right now isn't science versus arts. It isn't technical versus non-technical. It's curious versus closed — the people who treat "I don't know" as an invitation, and the people who treat it as an identity.

"I'm not from the science stream" is a comfortable place to stop. It sounds humble. It even sounds like a fact. But for almost everything AI asks of you today, it isn't a fact — it's a decision. And the good news is exactly that: if it's a decision, you can make a different one.

Published by IMA AI — June 2026. I run an AI company, and I tell my own team the same thing I'm telling you: stay curious. That part was never about your stream.